The Role of Metaorganizations in the Emergence of an Industry. the Case of Renewable Energy

Industry associations are meta-organizations (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2008; Berkowitz & Dumez, 2016), whose members are companies making business in the same industry. For example, the American Petroleum Institute includes all the oil companies operating in the US. The meta-organization allows firms to share information, in particular on best practices, to disseminate information on the sector in the public, to develop standards and to carry out common actions such as of lobbying. The functioning of these meta-organizations and their role in the constituted sectors have been studied within the framework of what Schmitter and Streeck (1985) called the « corporative-associative order ». These organizations develop standards and create private regulation alongside, and articulate with, public regulation (Brunsson & Jacobsson, 2000).

But how does an industry emerge and what role does the creation of an industry association play in this emergence, when the industry does not yet have definite boundaries? If one makes the hypothesis of an imprinting (Stinchcombe, 1965) or of a phenomenon of path dependency, does the way in which the meta-organization appears play a decisive role in the trajectory that the industry will follow later on?

To answer these questions, it is necessary to study a sector of recent emergence and to follow its trajectory since this emergence.

The study focuses on the renewable energy sector. This sector is recent and very heterogeneous (wind turbines, geothermy, solar panels, hydroelectricity, bioenergy, marine renewable energy, etc.). In France, one industry association - the Syndicat des Énergies Renouvelables (SER) - represents all these heterogeneous subindustries. Is it helping to build an institutional renewable energy sector that would otherwise not exist? In that case, the meta-organization would create the sector more than it would represent it.